[Bonus Episode] The Gut-Hormone Connection with Dr. Michael Ruscio

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This is really fun, fascinating.

So I was listening to this podcast, Dr. Ruso Radio, and I'm going to.

Have all this in the show notes, by the way. And I was like, I got, I got to grab this guy and get him on the show. I tracked him down because he had.

A lot of my buddies on the show. And this is a really fascinating interview because he's going to give you a different way to look at if you feel like you've got thyroid issues or you feel like you've got maybe a hormone imbalance, what could be underlying it? It could be one of those things.

But it might just be your gut.

And he also is providing a quiz so you can go, is it my gut?

Is it thyroid?

Is it sex hormones?

And he also kind of brings up.

The notion that you may be treating.

Thyroid when it's really not thyroid at all. It's really your gut health.

Now, of course, I love the idea of starting with fixing your gut, which.

Is what he proposes here.

And I really excited to share my new find, Dr. Michael Ruscio with you and this interview with you because it gives you a different way of looking at things. And I'm going to definitely have him back. So let me tell you a little bit about Michael. He's a doctor, he's a clinical researcher.

And he's a best selling author of.

Healthy Gut, Healthy youy. And he also does a load of research that gets published in peer reviewed medical journals. So very, you know, he's got that nice blend of being an academician.

Did I say that right?

Being an academics and doing research and publishing it and then also being in the clinic. And I think it's super important to do both because if you are just in the clinic and not doing research, you may not be really being able to prove those ideas. But more importantly, you want to make.

Sure that if you are doing the.

Research, you're in the clinic going, is.

This really working the way that they say?

Because nothing makes you know if your.

Research is working than putting it in.

Front of real live patients. He also speaks at integrated medical conferences.

Sad. I missed him this year at ihs.

And he has a great podcast which.

Again, I'm going to link to the.

Podcast and his book and this amazing gut quiz that he's got that will really help you figure out what's going on. Is it my gut? Is it my thyroid? Is it my sex hormones?

What is it?

You'll be able to get that@jjvirgin.com Guthormone now before we dive into this interview, I want to read a review. And this review says subscribe, which is.

Great because she's, she's telling you Christy loves you too, is telling you to subscribe. So Christy, I'm in agreement.

So subscribe everybody.

And five star review says so thankful for all of the content JJ gives.

Shows are the right length.

I appreciate the show notes so much.

Hey, cool. I'm glad you like those show notes. What I try to do whenever I'm doing an interview.

I've got my pen and paper right.

Here and I'm making notes as to what I want to make sure that.

We'Re putting in the show notes again. Today.

We're going to link over to Dr. Rus Show Radio.

Great podcast. We'll also link to his book and Healthy Gut, Healthy you.

And most importantly, to that incredible quiz that he has. And that quiz again is jjvirgin.com or the link rather.

It's jjvirgin.com guthormone but I'm glad to.

Know that you are using those show.

Links, the show notes, because we put.

A lot of time and energy into.

Them so that you have a lot.

Of goodness that you can refer back to. And I want to give you one more bit of goodness and then we will dive into the interview. Hey, jj, Virgin here. Okay, Real talk. So often the holidays sneak up on me, travel gifts, hosting, you know, all the things and suddenly it's like, wait, who spent what and where? And I know I'm not the only one who's looked at a bill in January and thought, wow, that escalated quickly. If you Want to keep your finances under control this holiday season, you need to be using Monarch. It's rated the Wall Street Journal's best budgeting app of 2025. Monarch is the all in one personal finance tool that brings your entire financial life together in one clean interface. On your laptop or on your phone. Monarch lets you link everything and gives you real time visibility so you're not shocked later. Right now, I've been checking the holiday spending category so I don't accidentally start the new year with that dreaded debt hangover. And honestly, just seeing everything laid out is already helping me stay more aware. This season, Monarch does the heavy lifting. It links your accounts in minutes, gives you smart categorization and super clear visuals. Yes, that end of year reset could be a real goal this time. Don't let financial opportunities slip through the cracks. Use the code virgin@monimal.com in your browser for half off your first year. That's 50% off your first year@monarch.com with the code Virgin.

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Welcome to the show, Dr. Ruso. I am super excited to be chatting with you.

Yeah, it's great to be here. Thanks for having me.

All right, so I kind of stalked you. I'm admitting it. But I love. I love this whole topic of gut hormones. So I was like, okay, we got to talk about the gut hormone connection. I'm going to. I'm going to hunt you down and find you. And I'm trying to think of who connected me with you because I just started to go through your podcast and go, who do I know that knows him? So I found you. Here you are. And I'm really thrilled to have you. So first off, thank you. I appreciate you taking the time out.

Pleasure.

And let's dive in because I just have talked a lot on the show about hormones. I've talked a lot on the show about gut health, but we have not talked about how gut health affects hormones. So I would love to dive into that. Start there with that.

Well, there's a rich world for us to dive into. Do you want to start any place in particular? Because I kind of have this dividing line where we have female Hormones and thyroid hormones. And we can kind of start with one of those if either one's more interesting.

Well, we're interested in both, and we have time. So you pick where you get to drive. How's that?

You pick where you want to start. Well, let's start with thyroid, just because this is something I've been speaking about quite extensively lately and maybe even taking a big step back as a primer to both hormone issues. And then we'll jump into thyroid. There's an order of operations that I think is very important for all healthcare consumers to be aware of, because when you go on the Internet and you're searching for why am I fatigued, why do I have insomnia, why do I have brain fog, why do I have joint pain? You're going to arrive at many different potential reasons for those symptoms. And so having an order of operations in terms of how to go through those potential causes can save you a massive amount of time and money that could be squandered on doing the wrong therapy. And so we want to start with the most common causative factors, because if we put those first, that has the highest probability of success. And so before going into any direct female hormone modulation therapy or thyroid hormone modulation therapy, most cases, not all, but most, should really start with undergoing some steps to optimize our gut health. Because it's truly amazing the number of cases that have been going from doctor to doctor only to later end up at my clinic, and they've failed out of the female hormone supports, they've failed out of the thyroid medications. And it's because a problem in the gut has been overlooked the entire time. And that problem in the gut can manifest. And this is one of the big oversights. You can have a problem in the gut that only manifests as brain fog, depression, fatigue, insomnia, joint pain. And this is what I think throws people. It's not always super obvious. I was really healthy, I went to Mexico, I got food poisoning, and then all my symptoms started. If that was the way these things were on setting for people, they'd be very easy to kind of unwind. But oftentimes the presentation isn't nice and neat like that. So I just want to make sure that people understand that there's. There's a very intelligent order of operations. And it's not an absolute rule, but certainly it seems to be very true for the majority that we want to start with the gut and then reevaluate, because you may see the symptoms that you thought were female hormone related. Or that you thought were thyroid related go away once you improve your gut health.

Okay, that is fantastic. And I think, you know, for so many people, they think gut health and think oh, but you know, I don't have gas or bloating and I'm not constipated. You know, they go to the natural in the gut symptoms and don't realize they can refer to other places. So.

And I learned that in college. I had an intestinal infection that was only manifesting at has very bad insomnia, brain fog and fatigue. And so I learned this lesson when I was about 23 and it's stuck with me ever since.

Okay, well, a win for everybody, right?

Yeah. So then coming to thyroid hormones. So this whole concept that I'm positing here, it's not something that's just kind of an esoteric concept that I'm cooking up in my kind of realm. There's a group of researchers in, in Athens, lead researcher Lovatis who recently looked at a group of about 291 patients and they had this kind of ambiguous hypothyroid diagnosis. As there's probably a number of people listening to this who are in a similar boat where they didn't really get a diagnosis from the endocrinologist, they went and they saw an integrative practitioner and the integrative practitioner did some expanded labs and said, well, some of these markers don't look optimal, so we'll start you on thyroid hormones. So they had this kind of ambiguous diagnosis and they wanted to see what would happen if we took these people off thyroid hormone. How many people would actually need the thyroid hormone? And they found that 60% of the patients did not need thyroid hormone and their thyroid hormone levels were normal after coming off medication. So this is something that we're now even seeing trickle into the peer reviewed medical literature that there's this incorrect overdiagnosis of hypothyroidism. Probably well intentioned because someone's going to a doctor's office saying I'm fatigued, I'm depressed, I'm overweight, I'm constipated. And they're searching for an answer. But it doesn't mean that giving an incorrect diagnosis and treatment because you're trying to help someone is going to make a person any better off. So there does seem to be this over diagnosis of hypothyroidism. Again because the symptoms are so easy to point to and say, well, I have brain fog, I have constipation, I have dry skin, I have Thinning hair, as many people will have some degree of hair thinning as they age naturally. So they look at that and they say, oh, well, I have the thinning hair, and that really means thyroid. So they start really kind of proclaiming this diagnosis erroneously. We do know that in other patients who truly are hypothyroid, and feel free to interrupt me at any point here because I'll just keep going.

You keep going. I love this. You keep going.

We do know that in other patients that are truly hypothyroid and on medication and still not able to see resolution of their symptoms, we do know that in some of these cases, treating various imbalances in the gut can lead to a resolution of things like fatigue, brain fog, improved mood, and in some of these cases may lead to a reduced need of thyroid hormone medication. So I'm not trying to make the case that people aren't hypothyroid. There are certainly people who are. It's about 5% of the population, whereas IBS affects about 15, 20%. They give you a prevalence juxtaposition there. But even in the patients who are truly hypothyroid and being medicated and still seeing symptoms, those symptoms might be coming from the gut. And when you improve the gut, because in the small intestine is where you absorb your thyroid hormone medication, whether it be levothyroxine or Synthroid or armor or whatever it is, if you improve the health of the gut, you can improve your absorption of the medication and then need less.

So here's the question. Listening to this, someone going to their doctor, how do they know whether it's. I would assume for everybody, we should always be looking at the gut and fixing the gut. But how would you know whether it was a thyroid issue or a gut issue or both of those issues, what tests should they be asking for? What should they be looking at?

Great question. So to determine if you're truly hypothyroid, it's actually not that difficult. So you go to your doctor, or you can do one of these direct to consumer lab tests, and you want to run a TSH with a free T4. And if those come back in the conventional normal range, I'm not talking about the more narrowed functional medicine ranges. If those come back in the normal ranges According to your LabCorp or your quest, then you're not hypothyroid. And oftentimes what happens is a analysis is done where the T3 is looked at. And that might be a little bit suboptimal, but that does not mean hypothyroid. So just as a quick recap, TSH is a hormone sent from the brain to the thyroid. The thyroid then spits out mostly T4. And then as that T4 hormone gets into your body, it's converted into T3. Now a major challenge is when patients are seeing integrative providers. Again, well intentioned. There's this canard that if your T3 levels aren't normal, that you're hypothyroid. And that could not be further from the truth. That is 100% incorrect. What you can see is when someone is under stress, they're inflamed, they're not eating enough, they're not sleeping enough, they're over exercising. Any type of stressor like this, inflammation, infection, they can decrease the ability of your body to convert T4 into T3. And so when you see that T3 level not optimal, it doesn't mean anything's wrong with the thyroid. The thyroid gland is still spitting out the T4. It's just that there's some type of stressor in the body that's thwarting the conversion of T4 to T3. But again, all too often people rush a diagnosis of hypothyroid when they see that T3 being incorrect. But that's.

Well, wait a minute though. Wouldn't you then want to do a TSH, a free T3 and a free T4? Because you could use that free T3 if it was not optimal and the other two were, then you could use as an indicator of a stress problem and be able to get people to be at least focused on dealing with.

You know, you could definitely make that argument. And I would be supportive of that, would I? What I'm not supportive of is when. And this happens a fair amount even in conventional medicine, this happens. And you're seeing, I believe it was in the Journal of the American Medical association published a review article in Medscape calling on conventional doctors to be more bridled in their use of thyroid hormone for the reason of looking at T3. And then the patient's demanding answers. The doctor doesn't necessarily have any answers, but they have this one lab marker, it's T3. It's not diagnostic of hypothyroid. But this patient's not. Well, I'm trying to do something for them. So they give them thyroid hormone and that's, that's where the problem occurs. And the patient doesn't fully understand that they're not hypothyroid, but rather the thyroid hormone is Just kind of an experimental support, and then they end up on it for three, five, seven years to only then later be undiagnosed and told you were never hypothyroid to begin with.

But it's really. It's actually a very interesting marker. And I've never thought of it this way before. I mean, we've always know that stress can interfere with that conversion from T4 to T3. But it never dawned on me before talking to you right now that that would be a really interesting way to look like. One of the things I've looked at to go, oh, wow, we've got some stress issues is when you see someone who's got, you know, a good hemoglobin, A1C, good insulin sensitivity, good triglycerides, but yet their fasting, blood sugar's elevated, and for. And diet looks good, everything. And then all of a sudden you find out they're super stressed. So that one, I've always been like, huh, could that be an indicator of some stress? You know, but this looks like it could be an absolutely great indicator for looking further and going, is there a stress problem here?

Exactly. Yeah. And that's what I've said before, which is T3 will tell you there's a problem. It won't tell you the source of the problem, but you can safely control, conclude, if TSH and T4 are normal, that the problem is not the thyroid. So it's almost good news in a way where we can say, okay, let's look in other places. Now, regarding how does someone determine if they have a gut problem? This is where the waters get a little bit more dicey. People will read on the Internet about a SIBO breath test or a stool test for parasites and imbalances, and that's all fine and good. Those are things that we've used both in a research setting, in my office and in routine clinical practice, and they can be helpful. However, there's also a number of things that we know exist, a number of imbalances that exist in the gut that we know exist that we can't test for yet, like hydrogen sulfide, SiBO, or small intestinal fungal overgrowth. So the gut testing is not perfect. So we can't hang our hat on testing results. And this is why I wrote Healthy Gut, Healthy youy, to give people a protocol they can go through in a stepwise fashion, and they can run through a series of interventions. They can make a change and then reevaluate after a number of weeks and say, are my symptoms improving and it's not just gut symptoms. They may say, am I sleeping better? Is my mental clarity improved? And that would give you an indirect symptomatic way of assessing if your gut health is improving. And that's the real challenge, is because there's nothing. The gut is so complicated. You have not only dietary factors where some person may do great on kind of a low carb paleo diet, someone else who is histamine intolerant or doesn't do well with high amounts of fiber may feel terribly from that. So just the diet requires a few different maneuvers to figure out where you fall kind of on this carbohydrate spectrum. And then that's compounded by the fact that there can be different types of imbalances in the gut, some relevant, some not relevant. I talk about in the book Prevotella Corpori, I believe it was 1826, a certain bacterium that, depending on what else is going on in the gut, that can be a perfectly healthy resident, or it can be a pathogenic or somewhat harmful resident. So the gut testing is as tempting as it is to say, aha, here's that one thing highlighted in red. And if I just kill that one thing, everything will be fine. It's not quite that easy. It's a complex ecosystem that requires a little bit of diligence in more of like a gardener approach.

Yeah.

Making these steps to cultivate the healthy soil and then assess your symptoms as a. As a way of distinguishing if you're making the appropriate changes.

Well, and I feel like there's so much we're just starting to understand about the whole gut microbiome, and there's so many other things that impact it, from medications to toxins to stress. You know, that looking at this and going again, oh, it's that thing.

And that's what happens. And that's what's really disheartening to me as someone who specializes in digestive conditions. The patients who come in to see me, my heart breaks. They've been to a handful of other doctors, and the doctors have thought that this one test is going to provide the answer. And the test has been treated at the expense of the patient, and the patient has gotten worse, or the patient has wasted boatloads of money, or they've read all these different things online, and they're kind of doing this protocol, hopping from protocol to protocol to protocol, and they're not understanding that just because you have access to the tools doesn't mean you know how to use them. If your car broke down and we let you into the machine shop. Just because you had access to all the tools to fix your car doesn't mean you'd know how to use them. And that that same thing can happen. So, I mean, I understand why people don't want to rush into a functional medicine provider's office because it can be expensive, which is why I try to be as cost effective as possible and also why I wrote the book. Just to give people kind of a, you know, here's what I do in the clinic, here's how you can do it yourself in kind of a stepwise fashion.

Well, and it seems like for everybody, if you just started first with improving food quality, like this is where I was kind of go on a rant. If, boy, if all we did was start to get good sleep, have great relationships, move more more, improve our food quality, eat more vegetables, and then let's see where things are.

Agreed.

A lot of stuff gets better quickly when you do that. So we talked thyroid and you said you were going to talk a little bit about sex hormones in there as well. Women's hormones, how do those factor in?

So women's hormones fall into kind of the same boat where you will see symptoms that could be female hormone related, especially things like depression, thinning hair, insomnia. And these again can come from female hormones. They can come from the gut. So we want to start with the gut. Give your body some time, listen to your symptoms, and then if the symptoms go away, it tells you the gut was the culprit. And what will happen in some cases is the symptoms will improve some, but not totally. There may still be hot flashing, there may still be mood swings, especially around menstruation, or they may notice that some of their gut symptoms are really flare when they're menstruating or if they're postmenopausal, they may just be stuck in this cycle of hot flashes, insomnia, and then fatigue the next day. And they can't get out of it. But they're a little bit wary about going on full blown HRT hormone replacement therapy. And this is where herbal medicines can be fantastically helpful. And I actually learned this back when I was a student and I was dating a gal who was a great gal, but. But sometimes I felt like she was bipolar because, you know, and I'll never forget we were, we were at breakfast together and she was rushing us through breakfast and then she just had to rush home to work because she needed to do some computer work. And then she calls me on her car ride home crying because she didn't feel like we had enough time together that weekend. I said, well, you're the one who rushed us through breakfast and rushed out of here. But. But her hormones were so off that she wasn't really in control of her own thinking. And when we put her on just a simple cocktail of a few different herbs like dong quai, black cohosh, chaste tree, within two months, even her family members are saying, gosh, you seem so much more calm. You seem so much more happy. So we want to start with the gut. But then some of these herbs that are corrective and non hormonal can actually be very helpful in getting that last little bit of balance in the female hormones that may be a byproduct of stress or sleep or age or what have you. This episode is brought to you by Corona. When you're on a beach with an ice cold Corona in hand, how can you not feel centered? But did you know you can get that vibe anywhere? That's because whether after work, at barbecues or at a bar with just a square squeeze of lime, Corona brings you La Playa mentality. Because while we all want the beach life, paradise doesn't always have palm trees. Corona La Playa awaits. Get yours@orderkorona.com Relax responsibly. Corona Extra beer, imported by Crown Import, Chicago, Illinois.

So it sounds like to me that in this, like, algorithm you would first start with like, let's look at the gut, let's start to heal it, let's start to feed it correctly, and then let's see where things are. Then we'll look and see, is it thyroid, Is it sex hormones? What can we do naturally? Maybe orthomolecularly, either, like, which nutrients might you be deficient in? What are some herbal remedies before you go to that which, and I love this process because it seems like to me, hormone replacement would be the last resort if these other things. And this way, if you did need to go all the way to bioidentical hormone replacement, you use the least amount because you've optimized everything else beautifully.

Well said. Exactly, exactly. And there's also this philosophy that if you put hormones into an inflamed body, they don't tend to do what you want them to do. So you really make the system healthier and easier to dial in a hormone dose once you go through this foundational process.

So I know you're gonna. We've got a quiz for everybody and I'm gonna also put into the notes. I'm gonna put where your podcast is, your website, and access to the book, how to get the book. But let's dig into the gut and healing the gut and some of your top tips for someone listening right now, what they could do right now that could start to help them heal their gut.

Absolutely. And I think diet, of course, is a great place to start. Just like you said, diet and lifestyle, that is the foundation. That is where we want to start. We can get so much yardage out of that. And even if those interventions don't fully fix the problem, they prime the system to respond better to any kind of secondary or tertiary therapies that you use afterwards. Now, I think most people have probably heard of an elimination diet. Another way of saying elimination diet or another form of that could be a paleo or a paleo. Like diet paleo doesn't mean you have to go high protein and high fat. It can be lower in fat, lower in meat, higher in fruits and vegetables. There are derivations of the paleo diet that can be employed. The main factor there is food quality. As you said earlier, getting off of processed foods, eating whole fresh foods, and trying to focus on healthy sources of fat, protein, fruits, vegetables, nuts and seeds. People have probably heard that message already.

Probably from here, because I actually wrote a book on food elimination, so that was my thing. But again, emphasizing, I really think our first place to start with all of this is I had a great mentor early on in nutrition, was like ADD before you take away. And I keep thinking if we just focus first on food quality, right? Like unprocessing your diet, focusing on food quality, a lot of the stuff just falls away anyway. I mean, one of the reasons the virgin diet worked so well is because when you pulled out the top, you know, high food intolerance foods, you actually just unprocessed your diet, like, made it impossible to eat and process processed foods. So, right, There you go.

So right. So I'm kind of preaching to the choir.

I'm hoping everybody listening is going, yes, amen.

Right, good. Now, what can be disheartening is when someone does that and they go, oh, I think I might feel a little bit worse. And this can happen when people, in some cases, are FODMAP sensitive. Fodmap is just a term that, that refers to foods, mostly carbohydrates and vegetables and fruits that are high in prebiotics or compounds that feed bacteria. Now, that's not necessarily a good or a bad thing, but if you have an existing overgrowth or imbalance in your gut and you're eating a lot of these high FODMAP foods, you can actually feed that imbalance. And this can happen when some people go on a high fruit and vegetable diet, they inadvertently also go on a high fodmap diet, and this may flare some of their symptoms. So this is where just having a food list of, okay, here's the high fodmap fruits and vegetables. I'm going to mitigate those. Here's the low fodmap fruits and vegetables, I'm going to focus on those. Making that change can produce fairly marked improvements in just a couple weeks in people who have that as an underlying issue or causative factor. So certainly trying a low FODMAP diet can be a great next step in dialing in their diet.

Now, is that in your book? Do you have those lists in your book?

It's in the book. And there's also a resources page that we link to through the book. And there's actually three different versions that we've created of the low fodmap diet. Most namely, one is a vegetarian version because there are some patients who are vegetarian. And a recent study looked at a broader offering or a broader analysis of the FODMAP content of common vegetarian foods. And so we included a kind of derivation of. We have our kind of regular low fodmap and then also vegetarian low fodmap. But that's also available through the quiz. The quiz people can take will point them to either the gut being their problem, gut and thyroid hormones being their problem, or gut and female hormones being their problem. And in each one of these scenarios, we discuss a consideration of the low fodmap diet.

Ah, awesome. I'm so happy to hear that. And I love that you've also included that vegetarian vegan option. I always say I'm diet agnostic. Like, I don't want to, you know, Paleo vegan. We're going to support everybody here. So I love that you did this. We've been getting a lot of questions in the community about fodmaps diets. So this is perfect timing to have this resource for everybody. So thank you for that. Absolutely.

And I should maybe mention this really quick, that when people go online and they look up a low FODMAP diet, they get confused because they say, well, this one handout doesn't match this other handout. And where a lot of that comes from is people in the Paleo community taking the low fodmap list and then combining it with Paleo rules and not telling you that. So the three versions that we list are the standard low fodmap diet, meaning unadulterated and allows things like grains and gluten. But some people can actually eat those and be fine. Even though we'd like to hate on them, some people actually don't have a problem. Shocker. So we have our standard low fodmap diet, which is the most broad. Then we have the paleo low fodmap diet, which conforms to both paleo and low fodmap rules. And then we have the vegetarian low fodmap. So this cuts through the confusion when you find different food lists that don't agree, and that's usually why there's disagreement.

Oh, that is fantastic. Thank you so much for that. So for someone now listening, this going, all right, I am now committed and convinced that I need to start with my gut and start healing it. And they're tracking their symptoms. I know they're gonna take the quiz because we're gonna guide everybody to that. And again, you'll be able to do that. Jjvirgin.com Guthormone gut hormone. Very simple. Because your name's hard to spell, Michael. It is. It is. It's not what it sounds. So for someone who starts to go through this, how quickly? Because I would imagine they're tracking their symptoms as they're doing their food and hopefully journaling it too, so they can connect those dots. But how quickly will they start to notice a difference?

This is such a great question because unfortunately, there's some philosophies floating around the Internet that if you feel terrible on a diet, you should stay on it, because six months later you're going to improve.

It's a healing crisis.

You're just detoxing, which, okay, maybe there's a rare time and a place for that. But most of the time, if you're on the right track, then you. Or track. Excuse me, Sorry, the inadvertent pun there. You should see improvements. Now, it's not to say you're going to fully see all of your improvements, but you should see these initial indications. Indications that what you're doing is working within about two to three weeks. So I tell people, when you're trying a new diet, give it two to three weeks, and at the end of that period of time, you should either be able to say, yes, some things are clearly improving, or if you're going, eh, I'm not really sure, maybe that tells you that you're not seeing any improvement. If you are seeing improvement, ride the wave until you plateau. Some people will, will plateau at 90% improvement plus, and they're pretty much done right. They're close enough to where they just give themselves a little bit of additional time after they plateau. And they might get to that 100% all on their own. And sometimes the 100% that we're seeking isn't even really attainable. My 100% would be like Superman. So I understand that we can't always get to that 100% that would be nice to get to. And if you're not feeling any appreciable improvement or you're saying maybe, maybe that's when we want to change our approach and try something else.

I just love that so much because here's my latest. My philosophy that I was going to say my latest, but it really is the philosophy that has come to be over the last 30 years is I think we need two different words. I think that there's diet, which is a short term therapeutic approach so that you can learn something, shift something. And then there's that other thing that we need a new word for that's really, you know, your ongoing eating plan. And so you use these things therapeutically and you go, okay, what's happening as I'm doing this? Because, you know, you're connecting the dots. You're going, is this, am I feeling better? Am I feeling worse? If I'm feeling worse, that's not a good thing, you know, because again, I do see out there, oh, I'm feeling horrible, I must be detoxing. Like, no, no, it's just not working for you. Right. And so I like the way you explain that is like, follow this. See the results you get when you get to that point. All right, then we'll start to look at what's next. Pull that into your daily diet, and then we'll see where you go next to get to that next level of your health.

Exactly. And what sometimes eludes people is it's usually not one intervention that produces all the results. So people will try Paleo, they'll feel better, and then they'll try the Paleo low fodmap and they'll feel even better. And let's say they get to maybe 60% total resolution of their symptoms, just as a rough kind of marker. And then they go, well, it didn't work for me. And so they throw all that out and they go start anew somewhere else. When if they could have just said, okay, what do I layer in on top of this? As an example, the next thing I'd recommend for most people would be a good, well rounded probiotic protocol. And that may take you from that 60 to that 90. And now you've got it. You've locked in the kind of secret link list of ingredients that are needed or the confection of inputs that are needed to get your gut to this harmonious eubiosis and balance. But it requires this kind of stepwise process, a little bit of patience and understanding that you may have to integrate a couple different therapies simultaneously to get there and not look for that one home run that's going to cure you in the matter of two weeks.

Right. Which is rare. And it's also one thing at a time. Incorporate that in, see how it does go to the next one. I love the way you explained all of it. So you've been an awesome guest. I was right to stalk you.

Well, thank you. You've done an awesome interview.

Well, thank you so much. I want to remind everyone, go take this quiz so you can do this@jjvirgin.com Guthormone that is what I said, right? I'm looking gut hormone. Yes, it was. All right. And I'm going to put all of the different show notes here. Will link to your amazing podcast, which is how I found you your book, and also to that quiz. So be sure to go there. And after the break, I'm going to be back with a little bit of a debrief and action steps as to what you want to do first. So, again, thank you so much and I appreciate your time, Michael.

Yeah, been a pleasure. Thank you.

Welcome back. All right, so this is where I like to give you, like, an action step or top takeaway from the interview. And what I really love today is to. Is I'm all about connecting the dots. And, you know, not just because someone's saying, hey, you should do this diet, or, hey, this is the best exercise for you, or, hey, you should take this supplement for you to really go, all right, what's this doing? Because so often I'll see someone say, oh, yeah, I'm going on this detox and I'm feeling awful. Like it's a badge of honor. I'm like, that's your body saying, hey, knock it off. So what I really want you to look at is, like, our big challenge is to connect the dots between whatever.

It is you're doing.

You're introducing as a new thing into your. Into your diet and lifestyle going, does this really work for me?

And.

And that is so key, critical, because, you know, the more that we go out there and start to study the gut microbiome, the more you start to see that there is so much bio, biochemical individuality and, you know, we don't know everything yet. So again, that's what, when I wrote the Virgin Diet, it was all about journaling, which is one reason I love to say, I'd say the big challenge today is use that journal. Use that journal.

Especially when you're getting ready to shift.

Into something new and you're testing it out. That's the most important time. So you can look back at that journal and go, okay, what did I do and how did it make me feel? And you should know pretty quickly if this is working for you or it's not working for you.

I mean, the key part of an.

Elimination diet is to go back and do that, is to test a food out and connect the dots and go, how do I feel when I'm eating this thing? And again, if you feel crappy, no.

That'S not a healing crisis. That's your body going, hey, this is. Makes me feel crappy.

Knock it off.

All right, so there you go. That's your challenge for today.

Whip out that journal.

Here's the thing we know too about.

Journaling is that if you want to be successful on a program, one of the key determinants of that is a journal. And it, I mean, like, basically free, right? So whip out that journal, focus on one thing at a time and really take the time to connect the dots between how you're feeling.

Now.

Now I'm going to do one more other shout out because I'm really kind of on a. This is one that I'm on a rant about. And that is really the idea of let's focus on improving the quality. If you want to improve the quality of your life, it's improve the quality of your choices.

And one of the first ways to.

Do that is improve the quality of your food. And you might, if you're thinking, oh.

My gosh, but that I can't afford it.

Well, actually, the most expensive food are processed foods.

And actually the most expensive food is.

The stuff that hurts you because that's going to end up with you going to doctors and spending money. So, yes, you can afford it, yes, you're worth it. And there are so many now ways to get, you know, we're unprocessing your diet. You're eating high quality vegetables, fruit, some nuts and seeds, wild fish, legumes. So let's go unprocessing, improve the quality quality of your food and let's see.

What difference that starts to make because.

A lot of stuff gets better when your food choices get better. So that should always be step one. Okay, thank you so much for that. Again, I want to remind you we have great show notes, especially today. So go to JJVirgin.com/forward/gut hormone, JJVirgin.com/guthormone. And what while you are here, I would love to know what you think of the show because I read all of them. The team, the whole team does. We read all of those, those reviews. I love to shout them out. And I shout out all of them, by the way. My, my team for a while there was like, I go, come on, guys. I'm sure they're not all five star reviews. So I want to see all of them. I want you to know what you really think and what you would really love because I do this show for, for you. Because my big mission in life is to help a billion, a billion, that's my moonshot people get healthy. And I'm doing my part here with the podcast show and then helping other health experts and docs build their platforms as well. And we've got to get that information out. So let me know what you want and I will feature more of that. And of course, while you're there, be sure to subscribe and share with your pals. See you next week.

Week.

Bye.